NICE, France — This is what it has come to in Canadian figure skating circles: the discipline that writers used to mock, ignore or capsulize in a digest item before heading to the bar, hoping to drink to forget, is now pretty much what we’re best at. Deepest, too.

Ice Dancing R Us.

Wednesday night in the short dance at the ISU world figure skating championships, 2010 world and Olympic champions Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir were first and Canada’s hard-charging B Team, Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje, were fourth, and in between stood Virtue and Moir’s American training partners, Meryl Davis and Charlie White, and the French couple, Nathalie Pechalat and Fabian Bourzat.

It will all come out in the wash on Thursday night — or Thursday morning/afternoon at home — but at the moment, it looks like a two-horse leg-wrestle astride the 49th parallel.

How this happened, we can’t say for sure.

Blame it on the Soviets, if you like. They made such a science of pairing flashy women and big, strong men and schooling them in the black arts of head-tossing, twizzling, makeup application and flamboyant arm-waving — and then, after the Union broke up, stacking the judging panels with so many fur-coated matrons from former Soviet republics they couldn’t have been outvoted by the United Nations General Assembly. It was adapt or die, for the West.

The occasional inroad from our side of the Atlantic, like Canada’s Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz, created barely a ripple in the European domination of the sport . . . if that’s what it was.

But then along came skating’s change of life: the ice-dancing flap that reared its head at the Winter Olympics Nagano in 1998, followed by irrefutable proof that the judging game was dirty, when the pairs results were fixed in Salt Lake City by the usual suspects four years later.

Out went the French judge and federation head, though the investigation curiously never named any co-conspirators. In came a new scoring system, necessitating more footwork scrutiny than the old “I like that better than I like that,” and anonymous judges, never knowing whose votes would count on a given night.

And, presto! The New World was in the game.

Bourne and Kraatz, who had almost always managed to be outmanoeuvred in the backrooms under the 6.0 system, broke the gold-medal ice for North America in 2003 at the worlds. Canadians Marie-France Dubreuil and Patrice Lauzon won back-to-back silvers in 2006 and ’07. The Can-Am team of Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto, were four-time world medallists and won silver at the 2006 Olympics for the USA.

Then came the exquisite Virtue and Moir, winning the 2010 Olympic gold medal and the ensuing world title, with Davis and White nipping at their heels and winning the world title a year ago.

And now, as proof that Europe is irritated at the upstarts hogging all the glory (or just that the lucrative Asian market has no dancers of note), organizers of this week’s world championships in Nice have ice dancing at the front end of the program — done by Thursday, leaving the weekend stage to the singles skaters.

A decade ago, it would have been unthinkable.

Wednesday, they might have paused to rue the schedule, with the French couple in third, close enough to make it interesting, but the intrigue is how the Canadians and Americans aren’t farther ahead.

Both Virtue and Moir, who earned a season’s best score of 72.31, and Davis and White, whose 70.98 was nearly six points lower than their best, were scratching their heads at having been docked for the level of a particular, inside-edge, outside-edge, pelvis-busting turn/step — called the Choctaw — that both couples thought they did correctly.

Too much information? That’s what I thought.

“I wouldn’t say the word was frustration, but with the levels and stuff, we really don’t understand why we didn’t get the levels,” said Moir, “why we’re not getting the Choctaws . . . we work every day on that in practice, we must be missing something, but it’s a really finicky thing.

“But that’s dance. You gotta come here and skate, that’s the best thing about the new system, you can’t just show up and kind of muck through the steps any more.”

“We weren’t terribly pleased with our marks, but it’s our job to focus on what we’re in control of, so we’re moving on to tomorrow,” said Davis.

“We felt a little bit more confident than the marks that we got,” said White, a blond-maned head-tosser nearly in the class of 2002 French Olympic champion Gwendal Peizerat, who’s been around this week.

“We really felt we were hitting those Choctaws — of course we’ll definitely want to find out — but it’s not going to help us now. Moving forward, we just want to bring that energy level we had in the short dance to the free dance, and just sell it.”

Thursday’s free dance ought to be exactly the kind of battle Virtue and Moir have relished when healthy, and not grounded by Virtue’s two rounds of surgery on her shins. The Canadians will skate to Gershwin’s Funny Face; the Americans to Strauss’s Die Fledermaus.

“We can execute the elements, but it’s so well-trained, we can really have fun with the program, get into character, and express the parts really well, hopefully,” Virtue said.

“It was a different kind of pressure to go out there and deliver after you’ve had three good months of really solid training, not like last year where it was kind of rolling the dice,” said Moir. “We put the work in, and want to get rewarded for it, but we still have to go out and execute.”

And in Moir’s case, execute with a broken heart, his beloved Toronto Maple Leafs having finally been officially eliminated from NHL playoff participation.

“I know, right?” he said. “Too bad for Burkie.”

Vancouver Sun

ccole@vancouversun.com

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